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Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has pushed back on reports that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei could be dead or brain-dead.
Getting into it: In an interview with Fox News, Pezeshkian told host Bret Baier that Khamenei is “completely” healthy and still running the country, saying he last met with him in person about a month to a month and a half ago and that the two spoke for roughly seven hours. Khamenei, 56, hasn’t appeared in public, on video or in a photo since replacing his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the US-Israeli airstrikes that started the war on Feb. 28. Pezeshkian blamed Khamenei’s absence on the “lack of security” created by foreign “aggressors.”
The younger Khamenei was reportedly seriously wounded in the same strike, and people in Tehran recently told The Atlantic they believe he could be dead or brain-dead.
President Trump has said he doesn’t believe Khamenei is dead. “And if he is, they’re putting on a pretty good show because they talk about going back to talk to him all the time to get a final blessing on things,” Trump told Glenn Beck, adding that the supreme leader was badly hurt on “the left side of his body, the arm, the leg, the whole thing.”
This all comes as Israel has made clear Khamenei is a target, with Defense Minister Israel Katz vowing shortly after Ali Khamenei was killed that any new supreme leader would be an “unequivocal target for elimination,” adding that it doesn’t matter what his name is or where he hides. The CIA and Mossad have reportedly stepped up efforts to find him, and since he is believed to have stopped using electronic communications, investigators are focusing on the couriers who carry his messages through several layers of intermediaries.
US officials told CBS News in May that Khamenei is holed up in an undisclosed location with little contact with the outside world, and that even senior Iranian officials don’t know where he is or have a way to reach him directly, which has slowed negotiations with the US. The New York Times reported that messages meant for him are handwritten, sealed in envelopes and passed along a human chain to avoid US and Israeli surveillance, and that his injuries were severe enough to require plastic surgery and a prosthetic leg.






